Who Will Catch Us As We Fall by Iman Verjee Page A

off by the president, swatted away within the gold tassels of his fly whip.
    â€˜He discovered that the mzee had allocated himself over fifty farms in Central Province and Rift Valley. That he will be displacing all the Kikuyu squatters and other farmers to make room for his fat cronies. No better than the colonialists,’ Dilip Uncle had said. ‘What else could he have done?’
    â€˜Not called our president a bastard, for one,’ Raj’s father had replied. ‘I’m surprised he wasn’t killed there and then.’
    â€˜Well, the mzee did call him one first.’
    And then, one misty February morning, Raj’s father came to break the news to him. ‘Now, beta ,I don’t want you to be too upset…’
    Pinto had been killed, shot at the gate of his house, riddled with bullets from those exact bushes Raj used to hide within, his nose irritated by the woody wild flowers.
    â€˜Must have been desperate.’ He heard his father and uncle speaking in low tones later that day as he lay upstairs in his bed, trying to understand his grief. ‘To do it in broad daylight and right outside his house! In front of his daughter and on that busy street.’
    â€˜Time to leave this place,’ Raj’s aunt had warned. ‘’I told you, they don’t want us here.’
    Raj had been devastated. He’d mourned as if he had lost a loved one, someone as close to him as his mother or sister, but somehow worse because, without Pinto, that budding dream of his lost direction. It wandered and tripped, became afraid of itself and hid tightly away under a horde of questions that would forever go unanswered.
    The picture of Pinto was framed and hung up on his bedroom wall and Raj tucked his dreams behind the glass so that they would always be close to him. Then he did what his father advised and moved on with his life, because it was silly to hang onto the dead and all the doubt that came with them.
    He met Pooja when he was nineteen, working as an accountant at the family’s fish shop and, over a shared bottle of coke, he told her the story of Pio Gama Pinto and of his aspirations and she fell in love with him and his eyes, which were as quick and bright as his words.
    Following the death of his uncle, Raj’s father sold the fish shop and started a small used furniture store where their main clientele were local Africans. It was during this time that Raj began to put into practice what little advice he had received from Pinto.
    Unlike his father, Raj was friendly with his African customers and employees, reprimanding the older man for calling them ‘thieves’, ‘lazy idiots’ and ‘monkeys.’
    â€˜But they’re stealing from us,’ his father had protested. ‘You should know – you’re the one doing the books.’
    â€˜Not all of them,’ Raj had corrected him. ‘And yes, some of them are thieves but there are also Indian thieves – and big ones too. Stealing millions of shillings from our country… so what can you say about them?’
    But the full realization of his dreams remained constantly out of his reach. Raj often blamed it on the fact that he was running a business, had become a husband and a father and that these things occupied enormous spaces in his life, leaving room for little else. He also knew that he was partly responsible – that though his dreams were beautiful, they were also terrifying and he had been slightly frightened to catch up to them.
    So, early on in his son’s life, when Raj recognized something in Jai that was reminiscent of his own idealism, he took it upon himself to nurture the boy, to teach him the lessons he had learned from Pinto – to mold Jai’s rapidly adjusting mind and body into strong, hard shapes so that fear would never fit into him.
    Which was why, upon seeing Angela’s son approach Leena as she played marbles, Raj had immediately sent Jai